Trainspottings Welsh revealed as Austen fan

However, the author of Trainspotting has revealed that his streetwise style owes as much to classical writers such as Jane Austen, George Eliot and Walter Scott as to modern pop influences.

Despite the self-conscious, anti-intellectualism of many of his characters, Welsh has revealed a hitherto unknown predilection for 18th- and 19th-century literature.

Despite previously insisting he had no literary heroes, he now claims James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner is “one of the best books ever written”, while Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s fiction was an important influence as a teenager.

He has also professed his admiration for the works of George Eliot, Scott and Austen.

“They’re still, to me, the greatest books ever written by English novelists. If you take it almost as a sort of canon, on the whole they’ve been such